'Fukushima' offers an activist's view of Japan's disaster

Published 5:14 pm, Friday, March 28, 2014

"Fukushima" by By David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman, Susan Q. Stranahan, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

"Fukushima" by By David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman, Susan Q. Stranahan, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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'Fukushima' offers an activist's view of Japan's disaster

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In 1982, fewer than four years after Three Mile Island's partial meltdown, members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) resisted the need to plan for worst-case scenarios at nuclear plants. The chances of a radiation leak causing widespread death, one member said, were "less than the possibility of a jumbo jet crashing into a football stadium during the Super Bowl."

Unfortunately, at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant in 2011, that jumbo jet came down.

In "Fukushima," two scientists, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and an environmental group known as the Union of Concerned Scientists recount the unlikely story of an earthquake that unleashed a tsunami that caused three nuclear meltdowns.

"Fukushima" reviews the unpredictable, unprecedented events that unfolded in Japan on March 11 three years ago: a "station blackout" at a plant that needed electricity to prevent disaster; heroic workers MacGyvering solutions to never-imagined problems; and the bumbling of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), the Japanese government and the NRC after the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

More Information

'Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster'

By David Lochbaum, Edwin Lyman, Susan Q. Stranahan, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

New Press, 309 pp., $27.95.

Though the book's language is often technical, its message is unabashedly activist. "TEPCO and government regulators were merely the Japanese affiliate of a global nuclear establishment of power companies, vendors, regulators, and supporters, all of whom share the complacent attitude that made an accident like Fukushima possible," they write. During accidents at other plants in the United States, "the storyline would differ, but the outcome would be much the same - wrecked reactors, off-site radioactive contamination, social disruption, and massive economic cost."

What's most terrifying is that the outcome is still unknown. "It is difficult," a man with a 4-year-old daughter living not far from the Fukushima exclusion zone told this reviewer in 2013. "We do not know the effects of radiation on small children."

While less technical, more personal books about Fukushima exist, "Fukushima" remains a great guide to yesterday's nuclear disaster that could happen tomorrow.